NYCPlaywrights March 7, 2026
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NYCPlaywrights
Mar 7, 2026, 5:03:01 PM (2 days ago) Mar 7
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Greetings NYCPlaywrights
*** FREE THEATER IN NYC ***
***
The first thing you must do, dear reader, is forget everything you think you know about Weimar-era cabaret. It definitely was not the type of performance depicted in the Broadway (1966) and Hollywood (1972) versions of the eponymous musical, which had more to do with the fantasies of those years than the stages of 1920s Berlin.
Indeed, Lotte Lenya—who played Fräulein Schneider in the Broadway production—did not see any resemblance of the Kit Kat Club to anything she had witnessed 50 years earlier. Christopher Isherwood (whose stories inspired Cabaret) had been to such venues, but recalled that they were phony tourist traps—in his words, “dens of pseudo-vice catering to heterosexual tourists. Here screaming boys in drag and monocle, Eton-cropped girls in dinner jackets play-acted the high jinks of Sodom and Gomorrah.”
Forget, too, the film The Blue Angel (1930): Though the songs performed by Marlene Dietrich were penned by Friedrich Hollaender—one of the outstanding cabaret composers of the 1920s—the venue in which she appeared was a lowbrow vaudeville hall in a small coastal town and not cosmopolitan Berlin. And forget, too, Kurt Weill: He never composed songs explicitly for cabarets, rather for opera and musical stages.
More...
https://www.carnegiehall.org/Explore/Articles/2024/02/01/Cabaret-in-the-Weimar-Republic
***
The musical Cabaret, first written and produced in 1966 and later developed into a movie as well as many different gives direct commentary on the events of the Holocaust.
The musical exists in the decadent Kit Kat Klub, where the Master of Ceremonies, or Emcee, warms up the audience with music. The story follows a scandalous relationship between American writer Clifford Bradshaw (better known as Cliff), seedy work in Germany, and a scandalous relationship with Sally Bowles. There are overt Nazi undertones in the music, especially in songs such as “Tomorrow Belongs to Me,” and anti-semitic sentiment in “If You Could See Her,” where the Emcee dances with a woman dressed a gorilla, stating, “If you could see her through my eyes… she wouldn’t look Jewish at all.” The musical has many themes surrounding inaction to the rise of Nazism, most distinct when Sally Bowles sings “I Don’t Care Much,” wherein she states that the growing political unrest and antisemitism has nothing to do with them. Most intriguing about the musical, it loops the audience into the inaction, where they are effectively complicit to the unfolding of history in the musical: whether that be revealing the Emcee in a concentration camp uniform pinned with an upside down pink triangle, a mirror forcing them to reflect upon themselves, or other stage tactics.
More...
https://broadwayinhistory.humspace.ucla.edu/cabaret/
***
If cabaret is many things to many people, most would agree it’s about marching to the beat of your own drum. For some, this means plying their trade on some of the biggest, most traditional stages Berlin has to offer. For others, it means going underground, into spaces ringing with notes of subversion and self-discovery.
One of the most formidable venues for this kind of cabaret is the circus tent at the end of a long dirt road near Greifswalder Straße. Founded by Juan Migama and Max Mond, Zirkus Mond has been a cornerstone of Berlin’s cabaret and varieté since 2018. Two of the Berliners who have graced its stage are Tania G and Fifi Fantôme, performers who defy both genre and gravity. “As soon as I was born, I started moving,” says Tania G, who performed at Zirkus Mond in September for the circus-cum-sideshow cabaret series Cabaret Chatok that she produces with fellow performer Maia Friend.
More...
https://www.the-berliner.com/berlin/cabaret-burlesque-history-nightlife-entertainment-performance-culture-stripping-drag-circus-freakshow/
***
New York’s cabaret laws had been on the books since 1927, born in the wanton days of the jazz age, but only really hit their damaging stride in 1943, when all musicians working in New York City were made to carry a “cabaret card” to perform in its nightclubs and bars, a license which could be, and was, snatched away or denied renewal at the slightest offense, effectively blacklisting an artist from performing in the city for years at authority’s whim. New York’s cabaret card provisions were intended to be a force in the fight against the city’s criminal element, but the licensing requirement had the effect of undermining New York’s capacity as an incubator of art for decades.
More...
https://www.local802afm.org/allegro/articles/a-brief-history-of-new-york-citys-cabaret-laws/
***
With theatre lighting, dust becomes glitter. Cabaret and burlesque have been part of my life for as long as I can remember – I’ve never been able to resist the lure of ordinary people creating extraordinary moments in time. These art forms are traditionally born in the cracks: in places where those outside the bourgeoisie and patriarchy – women, queer people, those with unconventional bodies and/or abilities – carve out stage environments for themselves, giving themselves the permissions that the wider world refuses.
I understand burlesque as igniting in the 1860s with Lydia Thompson and her troupe, the British Blondes – women who broke the previous mould of female performers appearing on stage only to look pretty, if at all. Lydia and co donned shorts and bared legs; they locked eyes with audiences speaking directly to them, joyfully pulling down the fourth wall. Burlesque was bawdy parody: classical masterpieces and stories of royalty might be “burlesqued” – played for laughs by mocking powerful public figures, sometimes by depicting them without clothes. Women cross-dressed, flirted, and insisted on being both funny and sexual on their own terms. The British Blondes stormed America and caused a moral panic doing it. These were working-class arenas where women held comic power and sexual agency long before they won political power – places where the rules were matriarchal, chaotic and, to a modern sensibility, unmistakably queer. As my pal costume historian Amber Butchart notes, Music Hall women were the first in Britain to appear publicly in trousers – their clothing itself a kind of revolt.
More...
https://diva-magazine.com/2025/11/27/this-is-what-cabaret-and-burlesque-offers-lgbtqia-folks/
***
Cabaret, by contrast, refuses to distance itself from its audience; this is the point. Cabaret demands engagement, interaction, and intimacy. We performers want proximity and eye contact. We want to be close enough to notice your reaction. We welcome banter and thrive on spontaneity. Cabaret encourages risk. Every show is co-created by the people in the room.
Where concerts impress, cabaret involves. The magic of cabaret is that the performer isn’t someone you admire from afar. The performer is a human being sharing a story, a joke, a confession. And the audience is not anonymous; it matters. Its energy, laughter, hesitation, and willingness to lean in all shape the performance. This intimacy gives cabaret its electricity. It is a form built not on distance, but on connection.
Several generations of audiences have never experienced someone singing five feet away without a screen or a smoke machine, just a voice in a room. This is a great loss: the art of storytelling, the craft of presence, the shared vulnerability of small spaces, the feeling that performance is a dialogue, not a broadcast.
Many people do not know the world of cabaret exists and yet there is likely a cabaret space, drag show, immersive room, or speakeasy in their own neighborhood.
Ironically, the qualities cabaret offers—authenticity, immediacy, unfiltered emotion—are exactly what we crave in an increasingly digital world. A sincere story told at arm’s length can have more impact than a million-dollar lighting cue. A song sung directly to a stranger in the front row can be more meaningful than a pyrotechnic finale. Cabaret is not old-fashioned. It is human in a way technology cannot replicate.
More...
https://cabaretscenes.org/2026/02/28/cabaret-vs-concerts-why-cabaret-still-matters-in-an-age-of-spectacle-concerts/
*** FREE THEATER IN NYC ***
COMPETING IMAGES
Written & Directed by Cesi Davidson
Does the artist create the portrait? Does the portrait create the artist?
What happens when the wishes of an enslaved Black mother and the wishes of an unfinished self-portrait collide?
We'll bring you into the world of Baltimore Maryland in 1805, the home of free and enslaved Black people. We'll introduce you to the life of Joshua Johnson (1763-1824), the first recognized commercial portrait painter of African decent in North America. Born enslaved, he enjoyed the life of a free man with his family as he created magnificent portraits of Baltimore residents. He was a "self taught genius." His work is currently held in the Metropolitan of Art, the National Portrait Gallery, and numerous private collections. In January 2024 his portrait of Mrs. Martha Hall Dorsey and Mary Ann Dorsey sold for a world auction record price of $1,134,000.00 at Christie's Auction House annual auction of Important Americana.
March 14, 2026 3 PM
George Bruce Library
518 West 125th Street
New York, New York. 10027
Post show conversation and audience appreciation gifts
Free and open for the adult public
https://myemail.constantcontact.com/Come-join-us-.html?soid=1133634030653&aid=RtOqwAOP4zw
*** BLACK WOMAN GENIUS ~ VIDEO POSTED ***
The recording of an excerpt of GENIUS by Kenndall Wallace, performed by Linda Obasi, is on the website:
https://www.nycplaywrights.org/2026/03/black-woman-genius-genius-by-kenndall.html
Written & Directed by Cesi Davidson
Does the artist create the portrait? Does the portrait create the artist?
What happens when the wishes of an enslaved Black mother and the wishes of an unfinished self-portrait collide?
We'll bring you into the world of Baltimore Maryland in 1805, the home of free and enslaved Black people. We'll introduce you to the life of Joshua Johnson (1763-1824), the first recognized commercial portrait painter of African decent in North America. Born enslaved, he enjoyed the life of a free man with his family as he created magnificent portraits of Baltimore residents. He was a "self taught genius." His work is currently held in the Metropolitan of Art, the National Portrait Gallery, and numerous private collections. In January 2024 his portrait of Mrs. Martha Hall Dorsey and Mary Ann Dorsey sold for a world auction record price of $1,134,000.00 at Christie's Auction House annual auction of Important Americana.
March 14, 2026 3 PM
George Bruce Library
518 West 125th Street
New York, New York. 10027
Post show conversation and audience appreciation gifts
Free and open for the adult public
https://myemail.constantcontact.com/Come-join-us-.html?soid=1133634030653&aid=RtOqwAOP4zw
*** BLACK WOMAN GENIUS ~ VIDEO POSTED ***
The recording of an excerpt of GENIUS by Kenndall Wallace, performed by Linda Obasi, is on the website:
https://www.nycplaywrights.org/2026/03/black-woman-genius-genius-by-kenndall.html
Thanks to Kenndall and Linda for their great work. And thanks to everybody who shared their work for the Black Woman Genius project.
*** OPPORTUNITIES FOR PLAYWRIGHTS ***
Nomad Theatre seeks 6-10 short plays to be a part of our upcoming show in August 2026.
*** OPPORTUNITIES FOR PLAYWRIGHTS ***
Nomad Theatre seeks 6-10 short plays to be a part of our upcoming show in August 2026.
Nomad Theatre returns to its roots with the Bar Plays.
A bar is a special kind of crossroads...a place where strangers become confidants, where regulars guard their favorite stools, where celebrations and heartbreaks unfold under the same low light. It’s a sanctuary, a confessional, a stage for small truths and big revelations.
***
Midland Community Theatre (Midland,TX) invites playwrights to submit a 30 to 40-minute one-act, or an excerpt by the playwright of the same length for the McLaren Memorial Comedy Festival 2026. Submissionsshould gravitate toward the inherently comedic.
Our selection committee will choose three finalists to be performed at the festival in a reader-style performance in our main proscenium theater.
***
Gi60 NYC & Gi60 Houston: Call for Play Submissions 2026
Submissions must not last longer than 60 seconds
Your submission needs your name, play title, geographic location, and contact information in the document as well as filled out in this form
You may submit as many one minute plays as you wish, but only one submission per form entry
All work must be totally original and the author's own work
Plays should not have been previously produced
*** FOR MORE INFORMATION about these and other opportunities see the web site at https://www.nycplaywrights.org ***
*** COME TO THE CABARET ***
The Moulin Rouge was founded in 1889 by Joseph Oller (1839-1922) and Charles Zidler (1831-1897). Located at the bottom of a hill in the Montmartre neighborhood, it opened its doors on October 10. Its founders wanted to create a place dedicated to entertainment for a diverse public and the fact that it was located in Paris’s 18th district (a fashionable but still quite rural area at the time), allowed the cabaret to quickly acquire a solid reputation that would in turn inspire international artists like Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec and Auguste Renoir.
At the beginning, the Moulin Rouge would throw champagne-filled parties during which famous dancers performed. It was also during this time that the world famous quartet known as the French Cancan was born. The Moulin Rouge served drinks during shows, spectators sometimes themselves dancing on the dance floor that was installed to admire the performers up close. With an unconventional architectural style and extravagant decoration (including an elephant in the garden!), the Moulin Rouge was more than adept at attracting clients who simply wanted to have fun.
More...
https://www.pariscityvision.com/en/paris-by-night/moulin-rouge/cabaret-history
A bar is a special kind of crossroads...a place where strangers become confidants, where regulars guard their favorite stools, where celebrations and heartbreaks unfold under the same low light. It’s a sanctuary, a confessional, a stage for small truths and big revelations.
***
Midland Community Theatre (Midland,TX) invites playwrights to submit a 30 to 40-minute one-act, or an excerpt by the playwright of the same length for the McLaren Memorial Comedy Festival 2026. Submissionsshould gravitate toward the inherently comedic.
Our selection committee will choose three finalists to be performed at the festival in a reader-style performance in our main proscenium theater.
***
Gi60 NYC & Gi60 Houston: Call for Play Submissions 2026
Submissions must not last longer than 60 seconds
Your submission needs your name, play title, geographic location, and contact information in the document as well as filled out in this form
You may submit as many one minute plays as you wish, but only one submission per form entry
All work must be totally original and the author's own work
Plays should not have been previously produced
*** FOR MORE INFORMATION about these and other opportunities see the web site at https://www.nycplaywrights.org ***
*** COME TO THE CABARET ***
The Moulin Rouge was founded in 1889 by Joseph Oller (1839-1922) and Charles Zidler (1831-1897). Located at the bottom of a hill in the Montmartre neighborhood, it opened its doors on October 10. Its founders wanted to create a place dedicated to entertainment for a diverse public and the fact that it was located in Paris’s 18th district (a fashionable but still quite rural area at the time), allowed the cabaret to quickly acquire a solid reputation that would in turn inspire international artists like Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec and Auguste Renoir.
At the beginning, the Moulin Rouge would throw champagne-filled parties during which famous dancers performed. It was also during this time that the world famous quartet known as the French Cancan was born. The Moulin Rouge served drinks during shows, spectators sometimes themselves dancing on the dance floor that was installed to admire the performers up close. With an unconventional architectural style and extravagant decoration (including an elephant in the garden!), the Moulin Rouge was more than adept at attracting clients who simply wanted to have fun.
More...
https://www.pariscityvision.com/en/paris-by-night/moulin-rouge/cabaret-history
***
The first thing you must do, dear reader, is forget everything you think you know about Weimar-era cabaret. It definitely was not the type of performance depicted in the Broadway (1966) and Hollywood (1972) versions of the eponymous musical, which had more to do with the fantasies of those years than the stages of 1920s Berlin.
Indeed, Lotte Lenya—who played Fräulein Schneider in the Broadway production—did not see any resemblance of the Kit Kat Club to anything she had witnessed 50 years earlier. Christopher Isherwood (whose stories inspired Cabaret) had been to such venues, but recalled that they were phony tourist traps—in his words, “dens of pseudo-vice catering to heterosexual tourists. Here screaming boys in drag and monocle, Eton-cropped girls in dinner jackets play-acted the high jinks of Sodom and Gomorrah.”
Forget, too, the film The Blue Angel (1930): Though the songs performed by Marlene Dietrich were penned by Friedrich Hollaender—one of the outstanding cabaret composers of the 1920s—the venue in which she appeared was a lowbrow vaudeville hall in a small coastal town and not cosmopolitan Berlin. And forget, too, Kurt Weill: He never composed songs explicitly for cabarets, rather for opera and musical stages.
More...
https://www.carnegiehall.org/Explore/Articles/2024/02/01/Cabaret-in-the-Weimar-Republic
***
The musical Cabaret, first written and produced in 1966 and later developed into a movie as well as many different gives direct commentary on the events of the Holocaust.
The musical exists in the decadent Kit Kat Klub, where the Master of Ceremonies, or Emcee, warms up the audience with music. The story follows a scandalous relationship between American writer Clifford Bradshaw (better known as Cliff), seedy work in Germany, and a scandalous relationship with Sally Bowles. There are overt Nazi undertones in the music, especially in songs such as “Tomorrow Belongs to Me,” and anti-semitic sentiment in “If You Could See Her,” where the Emcee dances with a woman dressed a gorilla, stating, “If you could see her through my eyes… she wouldn’t look Jewish at all.” The musical has many themes surrounding inaction to the rise of Nazism, most distinct when Sally Bowles sings “I Don’t Care Much,” wherein she states that the growing political unrest and antisemitism has nothing to do with them. Most intriguing about the musical, it loops the audience into the inaction, where they are effectively complicit to the unfolding of history in the musical: whether that be revealing the Emcee in a concentration camp uniform pinned with an upside down pink triangle, a mirror forcing them to reflect upon themselves, or other stage tactics.
More...
https://broadwayinhistory.humspace.ucla.edu/cabaret/
***
If cabaret is many things to many people, most would agree it’s about marching to the beat of your own drum. For some, this means plying their trade on some of the biggest, most traditional stages Berlin has to offer. For others, it means going underground, into spaces ringing with notes of subversion and self-discovery.
One of the most formidable venues for this kind of cabaret is the circus tent at the end of a long dirt road near Greifswalder Straße. Founded by Juan Migama and Max Mond, Zirkus Mond has been a cornerstone of Berlin’s cabaret and varieté since 2018. Two of the Berliners who have graced its stage are Tania G and Fifi Fantôme, performers who defy both genre and gravity. “As soon as I was born, I started moving,” says Tania G, who performed at Zirkus Mond in September for the circus-cum-sideshow cabaret series Cabaret Chatok that she produces with fellow performer Maia Friend.
More...
https://www.the-berliner.com/berlin/cabaret-burlesque-history-nightlife-entertainment-performance-culture-stripping-drag-circus-freakshow/
***
New York’s cabaret laws had been on the books since 1927, born in the wanton days of the jazz age, but only really hit their damaging stride in 1943, when all musicians working in New York City were made to carry a “cabaret card” to perform in its nightclubs and bars, a license which could be, and was, snatched away or denied renewal at the slightest offense, effectively blacklisting an artist from performing in the city for years at authority’s whim. New York’s cabaret card provisions were intended to be a force in the fight against the city’s criminal element, but the licensing requirement had the effect of undermining New York’s capacity as an incubator of art for decades.
More...
https://www.local802afm.org/allegro/articles/a-brief-history-of-new-york-citys-cabaret-laws/
***
With theatre lighting, dust becomes glitter. Cabaret and burlesque have been part of my life for as long as I can remember – I’ve never been able to resist the lure of ordinary people creating extraordinary moments in time. These art forms are traditionally born in the cracks: in places where those outside the bourgeoisie and patriarchy – women, queer people, those with unconventional bodies and/or abilities – carve out stage environments for themselves, giving themselves the permissions that the wider world refuses.
I understand burlesque as igniting in the 1860s with Lydia Thompson and her troupe, the British Blondes – women who broke the previous mould of female performers appearing on stage only to look pretty, if at all. Lydia and co donned shorts and bared legs; they locked eyes with audiences speaking directly to them, joyfully pulling down the fourth wall. Burlesque was bawdy parody: classical masterpieces and stories of royalty might be “burlesqued” – played for laughs by mocking powerful public figures, sometimes by depicting them without clothes. Women cross-dressed, flirted, and insisted on being both funny and sexual on their own terms. The British Blondes stormed America and caused a moral panic doing it. These were working-class arenas where women held comic power and sexual agency long before they won political power – places where the rules were matriarchal, chaotic and, to a modern sensibility, unmistakably queer. As my pal costume historian Amber Butchart notes, Music Hall women were the first in Britain to appear publicly in trousers – their clothing itself a kind of revolt.
More...
https://diva-magazine.com/2025/11/27/this-is-what-cabaret-and-burlesque-offers-lgbtqia-folks/
***
Cabaret, by contrast, refuses to distance itself from its audience; this is the point. Cabaret demands engagement, interaction, and intimacy. We performers want proximity and eye contact. We want to be close enough to notice your reaction. We welcome banter and thrive on spontaneity. Cabaret encourages risk. Every show is co-created by the people in the room.
Where concerts impress, cabaret involves. The magic of cabaret is that the performer isn’t someone you admire from afar. The performer is a human being sharing a story, a joke, a confession. And the audience is not anonymous; it matters. Its energy, laughter, hesitation, and willingness to lean in all shape the performance. This intimacy gives cabaret its electricity. It is a form built not on distance, but on connection.
Several generations of audiences have never experienced someone singing five feet away without a screen or a smoke machine, just a voice in a room. This is a great loss: the art of storytelling, the craft of presence, the shared vulnerability of small spaces, the feeling that performance is a dialogue, not a broadcast.
Many people do not know the world of cabaret exists and yet there is likely a cabaret space, drag show, immersive room, or speakeasy in their own neighborhood.
Ironically, the qualities cabaret offers—authenticity, immediacy, unfiltered emotion—are exactly what we crave in an increasingly digital world. A sincere story told at arm’s length can have more impact than a million-dollar lighting cue. A song sung directly to a stranger in the front row can be more meaningful than a pyrotechnic finale. Cabaret is not old-fashioned. It is human in a way technology cannot replicate.
More...
https://cabaretscenes.org/2026/02/28/cabaret-vs-concerts-why-cabaret-still-matters-in-an-age-of-spectacle-concerts/
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